Karen Dunnell

Dame Karen Hope Dunnell, DCB, FAcSS (née Williamson; born 16 June 1946) was National Statistician and Chief Executive of the Office for National Statistics of the United Kingdom and head of the Government Statistical Service from 1 September 2005 until retiring on 28 August 2009. Since its inception in 2008, she was also the Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority. She now has a range of non-executive roles including membership of Pricewaterhouse Coopers Public Interest Body, Trustee of National Heart Forum, member of the Court of Governors, University of Westminster.

Born Karen Williamson in Los Angeles, California (USA), she moved to Britain when she was a young child and was educated at Maidstone Grammar School for Girls and Bedford College, London. Her father was a US serviceman during World War II and her mother, who was English, was a teacher. Karen Dunnell has been married twice: to Keith Dunnell (1969–76) and Professor Michael Adler (1979–94). She has two adult daughters by her second marriage and two grandchildren. She lives in London and has a home in the Var in SE France.

Karen Dunnell studied sciences at school because she wanted to go into medicine. However, a growing interest in politics and society led her to study sociology at Bedford College, London, from where she graduated in 1967. She began her career as a health care researcher with the Institute of Community Studies, where much of her work involved healthcare surveys, and, in 1972, she wrote a book, Medicine Takers, Prescribers and Hoarders with Ann Cartwright,. This established a measure of morbidity and the relationship between medicines acquired through the NHS and over-the-counter. Dunnell then joined the Department of Epidemiology & Public Health at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School, working on multi-disciplinary projects alongside doctors, social scientists, statisticians and economists, including a major project that measured the cost of caring for people with severe disabilities in the community compared with the cost of caring for them in institutions.

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